Over more than 3,000 years the melody of the guqin has lost none of its power
BY CHEN NAN
When Wu Wenguang, a virtuoso performer of the ancient zither guqin, talks about its history, he likes to quote a folktale about the legendary friendship between a musician and his biggest admirer.
During the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.) there was a musician named Yu Boya who lived alone in a forest where he played the guqin. A passing woodcutter named Zhong Ziqi was intrigued by the sounds and stopped to listen. Yu’s playing conjured up various pictures in Zhong’s mind such as clouds flowing and waterfalls plunging. They became good friends. After many years, when the woodcutter died, Yu decided to smash his instrument and never to play again because he knew that he would never again have someone like Zhong to so intuitively understand his music.
“Such was the connection between performing and listening, which is linked by the guqin, an instrument that is endowed with the power to communicate the deepest feelings,” says Wu, 78. “When we talk about traditional Chinese culture, the guqin, which was played by many literati and other notables, is definitely at the core of this culture.”
Indeed, the guqin, the favored instrument of Confucius, was an essential musical instrument of ancient China’s educated elite. It was added to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2008.
“The Chinese zither has existed for more than 3,000 years and represents China’s foremost solo musical instrument tradition,” the UNESCO website says. “Described in early literary sources and corroborated by archaeological finds, this ancient instrument is inseparable from Chinese intellectual history.”
In April, when President Xi Jinping met French President Emmanuel Macron, a classic guqin piece, High Mountain and Flowing Water, was played to celebrate the friendship between the two countries.
Wu, born in Changshu, Jiangsu province, learned to play the guqin with his father, Wu Jinglue, who was also a guqin master and founded the guqin music school of the Wu family.
Wu Wenguang graduated from the China Conservatory of Music and the Chinese National Academy of Arts in Beijing before studying musicology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, with a full scholarship from 1985 to 1990. Since returning to China Wu Wenguang has taught at the China Conservatory of Music.
“My father, once a member of a guqin t
